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Toronto's RSM

Students involved in the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee have just launched the Toronto Revolutionary Students Movement. This past Wednesday, on clubs day at the University of Toronto, they worked at a booth, flyered the student body, and engaged with students who were interested, or at the very least curious, about the possibility of revolutionary communism. Although they are beginning as a small group of fellow activists, they still managed to show their presence by dropping a large "big character" poster from a nearby overpass.

The Revolutionary Student Movement in Toronto is hoping to link itself to the Revolutionary Student Movement in Quebec (or, more precisely, the Mouvement Étudiant Révolutionnaire) and is even planning on a multi-city conference between various revolutionary student groups (such as the Marxist Student Association in Ottawa), a possibility which is rather exciting.

Coordination between the student movements in different universities and different cities has always been the privilege of groups like the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), a rather liberal organization which tends to water-down radical demands and whose activists rarely participate in radical student politics. Whereas groups like the "pirgs" (OPIRG in Ontario), or other student leftwing orgs, have worked hard, in their own unique ways, to connect with student radicalism, the CFS bodies have generally been comprised of careerists. Even the CFS Graduate Student Associations have been overly liberal and careerist structures. (Speaking from my own experience as a graduate student: at my university, active lefties would gravitate towards the TA and Contract Faculty labour union, CUPE 3903, whereas careerists and purely academic lefties would gravitate towards the GSA.) In any case, those groups that, unlike the CFS, were able to push a radical agenda amongst students were as disconnected as the overall left. The disconnection is clearly evident when you have student activists at two different universities in the same city who are generally unaware of each others' activities––a situation that was pretty common.

In any case, hopefully there will be coordination between the new RSM here and the larger and older groups in Quebec and Ottawa. Coordination between student activists shouldn't be the privilege of liberal student federations; revolutionary-minded students should be making and benefiting from these links. And as much as I'm now more interested in focusing on activism outside of campuses these days, I still think it's great that an RSM in Toronto has been launched.

For anyone in the Toronto area interested in checking out or joining the RSM, their website can be found here.